Here's a summary (anonymous because I haven't written to each person to ask permission to use their names) of responses I got: David W. Inouye wrote: > In a field such as ecology it seems likely that interdisciplinary > collaboration on research projects could be beneficial, but in academic > institutions there may be political, financial, or other barriers to this > kind of collaboration. I would appreciate any information you could give me > about how your departments or campuses (or businesses) try to encourage > interdisciplinary research. ------------------------------ In business at least the one I was with cooperation between departments was always encouraged but because of proprietary or possible patent considerations normally contacts were frowned on unless there was a cooperative agreement between the companies. This type of cooperation agreement was found to be quite effective. Usually they turned out to be beneficial to both companies. Also attending meetings discussing related subjects was always encouraged. IMO some scientists get so involved with a specific project that they fail to see the over all picture and one needs to take a step back and take a look at the whole forest rather than a specific tree. ------------------------------ Hi, At McNeese St. Univ. the upper administration (if there really is such a beast) got the Board of Reagents to approve formation of an Environmental Research Center. It's prime function is to obtain grants, conduct research (via 3 full time PIs + post docs/masters students) and draw in faculty from various departments as PIs on cooperative projects. This has worked reasonably well. For example, after I was hired as director, I held meetings with faculty, found a core group who was interested in doing cooperative research, and together we developed a research plan/proposal. This was funded for 500k and we've been conducting several years of research in salt marshes restored from dredge spoil. The work includes: a) Myself and masters student (plant colonization, growth, etc.), b) A geneticist and I are looking at genetic variability in Spartina alterniflora populations in these sites, c) Two chemists have assessed levels of metal and organic contaminants in sediments (there was some question about the dredged material), d) a toxicologist + student are quantifying uptake of metal contaminants by flora and fauna, and e) a civil engineer is surveying the sites (elevations, etc.) and providing an assessment of how to develop 'better' dredge spoil deposition in marsh creation. So, having someone who's main function is to be a motivator and cheerleader for such cooperative work, and also is a PI (so is not just an administrator in an office somewhere) seems to work reasonably well. ------------------------------ Here at ESU we are rewarded by additional equipment and monies for collaboration between Divisions. We in Biology have an excellent relationship with Physical Sciences where we have our GIS and GPS labs. ------------------------------ Currently, I am working under NSF's Long Term Ecological Research program at ..... We are working on an analysis of farming practices in the Watershed by analyzing phosphorus reduction across time based on water quality, land use and development, conservation practices and technologies (Conservation tillage, \Buffer zones/strips, Erosion control: terraces, retention structures, Manure management, and Precision agriculture) and soil test phosphorus levels. I am using principles of soil science, landscape ecology metrics, GIS analysis, and spatial statistics. The interdiclinarity road is tough. I am an ecologist (in training) and sit in the Department of Rural Sociology. My funding seeks to integrate the natural and social sciences. More recently, this department was awarded alarge NSF grant called the IGERT ( Integrative graduate education training program). This will continue to build on the interdisciplinarity work thats has already gone on here. I say it is tough becuase, one has to be very entrpreneurail to get the education one needs to b called " anything/discipline" I am not a sociologist, yet most of my intereactions are here in RSY. But am I an ecologist? Well, my BA and MS were in ecology and fisheries but putting the farmer into the framework of a species of interest is difficult. ------------------------------ I have found this question is handled in different ways with varying success at different academic institutions. It usually follows three models: (1) Departmental: Some institutions approach the problem by establishing interdisciplinary departments which either (a) have a distinct departmental faculty whose training comes from a variety of fields such as the Department of Resource Development at Michigan State University or (b) draw upon a distributed faculty across the campus covered under a departmental umbrella as their "second home" such as the Environmental Science Program at Miami (Ohio) University and my Program here at xxx College. (2) Divisional/Institute: Some institutions approach this problem by the creation of overarching units such as the Experiment Stations and Sea Grant Institutes at Land Grant Colleges (this works better for fostering interdisciplinary research at some institutions than at others) or by the creation of stand alone research/outreach institutes which draw upon faculty in similar fashion to model 1(b). Examples of this would be the Water Research Institute at Michigan State. (3) Individual Faculty Initative: A path for great success or failure, and usually time limited. Hope this helps. My familiarity with Michigan State and Miami comes from pursuing my Doctorate and Masters at each institution respectively. ------------------------------ Our research office keeps me informed of people from other departments with similar researc interests to mine. But that is the extent of the effort. ------------------------------ This is the biggest issue I deal with at xxx University. We have made some progress already, but it is small, hard wrought, and based on external funding. However, I do see that this University (and several other campuses as well) are coming round to the idea that interdisciplinary research, particularly concerning ecology and the environmental issues that will increasingly face us, is the way of the future for research and education. Let me give a small amount of background to ground my comments. CERC (Center for Environmental Research and Conservation) was created by a private gift in 1994, at the same time that the Provosts Office had decided to foster several new initiatives colletively known as the Columbia Earth Institute (CCEI). (You will have seen the Science piece recently about CEI and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory). CERC (Columbia, Wildlife Preservation Trust International, The New York Botanial Garden, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Wildlife Conservation Society) started faster than the other centers, and has been used as a model for them, but it is theoretically just a part of the CEI, which is probably the largest shift in recent history on this campus. The earth is seen as the focus of as much of what happens here as possible. My work included creating a program to educate conservation biologists, ecologists, and systematists. Following the CONS model I included a year-long program of policy and economics (a 24 point certificate in Environmental Policy) which is mandatory for our PhD students, who are funded for 5 years. (I'm now working on an IGERT to continue funding, and others have been working on foundation funding.) It also consisted of trying to be a "matchmaker" for scholars in different disciplines. I have run a small grants program for 3 years now, to provide seed money for inter-disciplinary research teams. We have social/educational events to get the different disciplines to mix and hopefully come up with new resesarch ideas. If someone comes to me with an interesting idea but no partner, I help to find one. I can only do that because I've tried to get to know something about everyone's research. Having an interdisciplinary background has proven invaluable for this, and I am grateful for the CONS program and opportunities I had at UMCP (just wish I had learned to do sequencing while I was a student!) which enable me to do this. Our young faculty is fighting hard to have interdisciplinary work counted for tenure. Joint appointments are becoming more common, and release time is granted so that new research can be undertaken. I'll give one example. Our environmental economist has a three-way appointment in CERC, the Dept. of Economics, and the School of International and Public Affairs. He has in effect sold his teaching time for general economics so that he can work next year on projects generated with colleages not only in CERC, but in other CEI centers. (He's even working on a project with someone in AREC) I granted this professor two small grants, one on carbon sequestration, and one on landscape fragmentation and its economic consequences. So he is working with GIS geographers, botanists, human ecologists, and even zoologists. It is difficult for the faculty to do this on their own because there is no incentive. But I am not faculty, and I can take the time/career risk to try and push for these changes through committee work. I help oversee joint external funding submissions, come up with ideas for day-long meetings for our faculty to exchange ideas (next year, after I leave here they should be having one on plant-animal interactions, esp. pollination biology, and another on advances in biogeography). Even our students are turning around. Most came in thinking policy was a waste of their time. Now one of our first students (ethnozoology) is spending the summer in Eastern Europe helping the universities set up environmental epistemic communities so that different universities in different countries can work on ecological problems together. So, some of what works includes: - having organized, competent administrative help - creating interdicsiplinary degrees, which get students and faculty in different departments to mix (include requirement that students TA in more than one course) - using seed money ($5-$15,000 is enough) to jump-start interdisciplinary research - using seed money to fund a program for young investigators (post-docs and new faculty only) - getting dept chairs to acknowledge the contributions their faculty make elsewhere (hardest part!) - run a wekly seminar series, day-long symposia, monthy teas, and/or other get-togethers to mix everyone up with an intellectual a catalyst - work on external funding proposals with people in other departments and thus get some funding to back you. - having a higher university authority (in our case the Vice Provosts Mike Crow and Peter Eisenberger) sponsor a dialogue on the subject I hope this will be of some help to you. As you might have noticed from my tense useage, I plan to leave Columbia fairly soon but it is not because I think these programs are weak or I dislike my work, it is because I can't bear New York as a place to live. I'll be job hunting when I return from Brazil in August. I'd like to move in to one of the foundations or agencies that supports this type of research. ------------------------------ At my college, a good liberal arts college, there is encouragement for interdisciplinary interactions. Mostly the college promotes interdisciplinary research because it leads to interdisciplinary courses and teaching. We like to see scholarship carry over into the classroom and we like students to see connections between disciplines. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged mostly via written and oral support from the Dean and promotion review committes which look favorably upon such collaborations. Funds to support interdisciplinary research for the most part come out of the general college wide research fund. We can typically get one to two thousand dollars from the college per year as seed money to start projects. We have to come up with any additional funds on our own. The college is starting to promote interdisciplinary scholarship more actively. In particular the college has identified certain areas as places we would like to establish "centers of scholarly excellence". Right now we have a center on studies of Abraham Lincoln and another on public policy. We are attempting to develop a center for environmental research. An econ professor and I are trying to find external funding to examine the costs and benefits (both economical and ecological) to local strip mine reclamation projects. This kind of interaction is what we would like an environmental center to promote. ------------------------------ Your posting about mechanisms promoting interdisciplinary research touched a chord with me. I'm doing quite a bit of work currently on human dimensions of the environment, and on economic issues in biodiversity. There is a common motif behind what success I've seen in both areas: collaborators who are willing to work to understand the ecological issues and at the same time cast their disciplinary knowledge into terms I can understand, and conversely for me. For the HDE work my collaborator are my wife (a demographer at the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy and an Associate Professor in Resource Economics and Policy here) and a wildlife graduate student of mine. He got interested in the interface problem, took one of D's courses, and has worked very productively on the issues. (He'll be going to a post-doc with the Forest Sevice in the Fall, to continue to work on these issues). For the economics work I've had a variety of collaborators (different projects) and I think it has been somewhat less successful because less effort was made to master the other's disciplines. There are no formal mechanisms to promote interdisciplinary work here (the Univ. is too backward and/or too poor to put resources into such an idea). We have some funding from NSF, and both D and I have been able to justify using some of our other (not shared) grant funding also to support work of this type because of its relevance to the "core" disciplinary questions. One thing that I think helps enormously is background training. My first deree is in physics, with a doctorate in ecology, and D has degrees in social science, geography, and demography. Against this background I don't think either of us have hang-ups about the utility of the interdisciplinary work and are both confident enough about it to be able to make clear to our disciplinary colleagues that it is as solid research as anything they do. One of the barriers that is significant is language: particular terms mean different things to the different disciplines and we've had to learn what these are. Another issue that we have managed to by-pass but that I have seen in other people's efforts to do such work is one of training: as a simple example, if an ecologist is to work with a mathematician he or she MUST invest in learning more than pidgin mathematics if he or she is to be more than a mindless consumer of what the mathematician serves up. Without such mastery there is first a barrier in casting the ecological problem into a format that the mathematician can recognize as an instance of a class of math. problem. Second, and a more severe problem, is that when the mathematician has completed his or her analysis the ecologist has to be able to evaluate the mathematical formulation for ecological validity. That is, even if the ecologist cannot write the math., he or she must at least be able to read and understand it at a non-superficial level. This kind of issue permeates all the interdisciplinary work I have been involved in: passive consumption of another discipline's product is less fruitful than active effort to master the other topic (from both sides). Finally I should acknowledge my own debt to one institutional effort to promote interdisciplinary work. In the late 1960s the Nuffield Foundation in Britain sponsored the N.F. Biological Scholarships which allowed young researchers in the life sciences the opportunity to acquire a second degree in physics or chemistry and allowed physicists and chemists the opportunity to study for a degree in a life science. The idea was that the resulting cross-training within the body of a single individual would be the most effective mechanism for promoting interdisciplinary work. It is perhaps no accident that our most brilliant ecologists have been highly competent physicists or engineers such as Bob May or John Maynard Smith who have chosen to bring their training into ecology. In particular, their cross-disciplinary training eliminates the language and communication barriers I mention above. If I were in charge of promoting interdisciplinary research, I'd look to developing something along the lines of the Nuffield Foundation project. I realize that the above doesn't help you with factual material about mechanisms to promote interdisciplinary research but it may be useful background. I'd be glad to clarify or help further to the extent that I can. ------------------------------ Unfortunately, I do not have any good news on how our university encourages interdisciplinary research. Although our departments speak about the need for interdisciplinary research, they discourage it. They believe that it dilutes your knowledge in your specific field of expertise, and that you should be collaborating with people within your department. Examples: - Competition between departments for "who brings in the most money," - Reluctance of departments to cooperate with each other in cost-share arrangements (almost lead us to miss a grant deadline) - Separate computer networks on campus with their respective firewalls make it more difficult to ftp data and files across campus than around the world - Departments review faculty on their progress in terms of their specific field, and give less regard to interdisciplinary studies (e.g. interdisciplinary grants and publications). Many Dept. heads judge faculty on "independence," and interdisciplinary studies are regarded as dependence on a team - Departments judge faculty contributions to the Dept as the highest priority, and care less about contributions to the University or to the issues addressed by interdisciplinary teams - Accounting departments on campus do not cooperate with one another well, so when an interdisciplinary grant is split between departments, it is difficult to share costs across departments. They also do not return indirect costs in a comparable way across departments (some do not return indirect costs at all), so that there is inequity in funding of work and equipment on the different sides of a grant, which is designed to meet a common goal ------------------------------ My alma mater, U of Washington's School of Marine Affairs, was an interdisciplinary school requiring science (usually marine ecology) as well as economics and other classes of one's choosing. SMA only offers Master's degress right now but just as I was leaving there was a push to start a University-wide interdisciplinary PhD program. There was a great deal of resistance on the part of the administration and many of the faculty, who saw it as a way for students to suck departmental resources out of the department. UW was not willing to create a free-floating TA position and none of the departments wanted to sacrifice one of theirs, even if that department would be the student's primary home. I believe that's how it currently stands, and if you hear of any great incentives for either faculty or students I'd like to hear them so I can forward them on. ------------------------------ Just an impression, based on my recent experiences at five American universities, but I sense that interdisciplinary research is basically ignored. It's not that it's actively discouraged (which some have charged), so much as nobody seems to want to do it. That's true within disciplines (community ecologists don't talk to physiological ecologists, botanists don't talk to zoologists, theoreticians don't talk to empiricists, etc.), and it's certainly true between disciplines (most ecologists don't have the remotest clue about, or interest in, say, postmodernism). If you're interested, look out for my forthcoming review in _Ecology_, in which I touch on this problem. ------------------------------ Here at Western Illinois University there are no rewards, incentives, or even encouragements to conduct interdisciplinary research. Pretty dismal.